Quotes By Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

“The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?”

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?”

“I choose to trust that inspiration is always nearby, the whole time I’m working, trying its damnedest to impart assistance. […] Sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying.”

“I don’t sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.”

“This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift – or curse, perhaps – of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we’re just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”

“My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said,’Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true”

“In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: “Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.”

“Your tears are my prayers.”

“There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, “Let me take care of you forever,” and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely…”

“من شأن السجود أن يصبح باردًا ويغرق في الملل المألوف إن تركت انتباهك يشت عنه .ولكن إن حافظت على تركيزك ، فإنك تتحمل بذلك مسؤولية الحفاظ على روحك”

“Religion is for those who don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

“نصف فائدة السجود تتمثل في الطلب بحدّ ذاته ، في النية السليمة الواضحة .”

“Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captain of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors… In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.”

“A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this IS grace.”